


Gravity's Bringing Us Down

by Thorne



Category: Sports RPF, Swimming RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-07-31
Updated: 2012-08-01
Packaged: 2017-11-11 02:53:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 17,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/473694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thorne/pseuds/Thorne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which underwear is stolen, the unspoken Olympic Rule is invoked, and nobody knew Pieter van den Hoogenband even <em>had</em> a brother.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part 1

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for asouthernthing, in the olympic_slash ficathon. Set back at the 2004 Athens Olympics. Title from the Beulah song of the same name.

_Wednesday, August 25th, 10:24 AM_

He came out of sleep like he was rising through water after a turn rather than a start, a continuing action rather than exploding from a standstill. Something had moved; he'd responded. The sunlight had come in through the window and was hitting him square in the face. Michael tried to hide his face in the pillow. There didn't seem to be a pillow. He tried to hide his face against something else, but it made a funny grumbling noise and shifted away. The world was against him. All he wanted to do was go back to sleep, but his bladder had definite ideas about him going elsewhere.

Michael fumbled his way out of the bed. If he kept his eyes closed, it didn't count and he wasn't really awake. He took two steps forward and walked right into a wall. Fuck.

"Fuck."

Squinting, he corrected his path course. Wall. Desk. Armchair. Several articles of clothing strewn on the ground, some of which looked like his, and some that he didn't recognize. More wall. Closed bathroom door on the other side of the room where it should have been. His mind worked on that ponderously, finally concluding that first, he'd slept in the opposite bed that he was used to, and that secondly, he wasn't in his own room, or even another Olympic Village dorm room. He was, in fact, in a strange hotel room he’d never seen before. Huh.

He scratched his balls and realized that he was also naked, something that he probably should have picked up on sooner. 

The bathroom door wasn't locked, but someone was already inside. Michael could hear the shower running. It didn't help his raging need to take a leak, and it reminded him that the inside of his mouth felt like a desert, and if he didn't get some water within about ten seconds, he would die. 

Someone else was in the bed that Michael had just climbed out of, facedown with nothing visible but a tousled head of short, dark hair and a long expanse of tanned back. It was a very muscular back. Distant warning bells began to go off in Michael's head. The tracksuit jacket draped over the back of the chair was bright orange and blue.

Michael was suddenly a hell of a lot more awake than he had been five seconds ago.

He glanced around the room, looking for his shirt and a more specific clue as to where the hell he was. He didn't see his shirt anywhere. That meant he'd wandered, probably drunk, through various parts of Athens without a shirt, and he'd ended up in someone else's hotel bedroom. Hopefully, everyone else had also been too drunk to notice. There was an empty schnapps bottle on the desk. 

Still tip-toeing and checking the other bed over his shoulder every few seconds, Michael crept over to the desk. The ID badge was under the bottle. He lifted the bottle, grabbed the badge, and set the bottle down again. Even the quiet clink of glass against wood seemed incredibly loud, and he wasn't sure if that was his paranoia or if he was still kind of drunk. It was hard to tell.

He knew the name on the badge. He'd already seen it on the scoreboard during the past week. Fuck. He put the badge down.

There was another empty bottle halfway under the room's second empty bed. No glasses. Michael poked further under the bed. He found a pair of gray boxers that he thought were his, a pair of jeans that had to be his because they had his ID badge in the pocket, a plain black shirt that probably wasn't his, a pair of dark blue briefs that definitely weren't his, and three recently used condoms that he had no idea what to think about. 

He put the boxers and his jeans on, and after some thought, the shirt as well. He edged back towards the occupied bed, cautiously checking under there. There was a half-full bottle of tequila, a sock, a Pearl Jam CD, a pair of orange and blue track pants, another pair of jeans, a pair of white boxer briefs still tangled inside the jeans, and two more used condoms. 

Details were beginning to emerge in his mind, a confused jumble of weirdly vivid memories, like shards from a stained glass window. Some drinks. A bet. More drinks. Going out, weaving his way through the club to the ear-splitting beat of Greek techno. Downing Jaeger bombs; no wonder his brain was shot to shit. Big blank spot. Photos, lots of photos, a constant lightning-flash throb coming at him from all angles until blobs of light danced in front of his eyes and he could barely see. More blank. Laughing. Walking. Stumbling. Schnapps, candy-taste of it in his mouth; drinks like that always fucked him up because the sweetness always made him misjudge how drunk he was. Blank.

The hot, almost too-sweet taste of someone else's mouth, and the backwash of a shared shot. Blank. The room spinning. Panting, taking forever to come, and not sure if he ever did or if he'd been coming the whole time. Blank blank blank. Stickiness, then down and out into sleep, like stepping off a cliff into the ocean and going all the way to the bottom. Blank. Waking up.

It was way too much to think about, so Michael didn't.

Instead, he sat on the floor and tried to ignore the urge to piss. His sandals were next to the bed, set precisely side by side. After a few more minutes, he put them on, and then went back to staring blankly at the wall. He still wanted some water. The inside of his mouth tasted like a swamp, if that was even possible when it also still felt like a desert. 

Man. He was definitely still kind of drunk.

There was a wallet lying under the bed. Michael hooked it out with his foot. He flipped it open and glanced briefly at the ID inside, then did a double-take and looked closer, because, whoa. What the hell?

No longer bothering to stay as quiet, Michael got up and went back to the desk to look at the first ID badge again. He squinted at it, then back at the driver's license in the wallet, sure that he was seeing some kind of misprint. He blinked hard. No. What the _fuck?_

The person in the bed was making sleepy but definite waking-up noises. In the bathroom, the shower turned off. 

Michael jumped across the room in three giant steps, reached under the bed, grabbed the white boxer briefs, scrambled to his feet, and fled.

***

_Saturday, August 21st, 11:57 PM_

It was, surprisingly enough, Ian Crocker's fault.

If Ian hadn't raised the underwear possibility, they would have just ended up with some kind of regular scavenger and/or snipe hunt, Tom and Lenny's last-ditch ploy as team captains for interrupting the all-night binge drinking party, and getting them out into other areas of the Village where they could choke on their own vomit and no longer be Tom or Lenny's problem. It was really the kind of idea that should have come out of Brendan, who had a history for pulling pranks that involved speedos and underwear, or Aaron, who just plain had a history. It would have been a typical Gary Hall Jr. suggestion, except he had passed out and people were drawing on his face with sharpies. Nearly everyone else was too drunk to string coherent sentences together, let alone mastermind international panty raid challenges.

They'd been experimenting with all the different ways they could drink ouzo, and mostly discovering all the different ways they shouldn't drink ouzo, and between that and all the pent-up adrenaline and the bragging and the trashing of other countries, the challenge emerged.

"That's fucked up," Michael said, sprawled on the couch. He struggled to sit upright, and the bottle between his thighs sloshed a little on his pants. He decided he was happier staying horizontal. "Because. I mean. Relays. That would mean you'd have to sleep with four different people." 

"You don't _have_ to sleep with anyone," Ian explained patiently. "You just have to get a pair of their underwear. If they won a gold medal."

"Why?" Erik asked.

"Why not?" Ian said, and shrugged. "Be fun. It's like trading the pins. We can put them up on the wall."

"Yeah, but not a challenge," Erik said. "I dunno if you noticed this, but six of the swimming community's gold medals are lying right over there on the couch, hogging the bottle." Michael lazily flipped him off, and licked ouzo off his fingers, sticky-sweet licorice taste all over his tongue.

"So," Erik continued, "what's the payoff for getting six pairs of Michael's underwear? I mean, I want to know what it's worth if I put the effort into it."

"Hey," Michael said, sitting up in a hurry. "No one's getting _six_ pairs of my shorts. I need those for the rest of the week."

"I was thinking it'd just be for the fun of the challenge, but we could all kick in fifty bucks or something." Ian shrugged again. "Winner takes all. And a lot of underwear, if that's your thing. You could probably ebay it, make more than you would just from the pot."

"So, what," Ryan asked. "Whoever gets the most pairs by the end of the week wins? Is that how we’re deciding the winner?"

"I've totally got this," Michael gloated. "I'm gonna own."

"No way," Aaron said. "You can't just produce your own underwear and get points for it. That totally misses the whole point of the contest." 

"Who made you the Underwear Nazi?" Michael asked. 

"No, he's right," Erik said. "We need to work out, like, a point system. Otherwise it's kind of unfairly weighted. Like, if you're rooming with someone, it's a hell of a lot easier to get a pair of their shorts than it is if you’re trying to get, say, Inge de Bruijn's thong."

"Dude, if you score Inge de Bruijn's thong, you should win the whole thing, game over. I don't care how many pairs of Michael's shorts you come up with." Larsen looked kind of dreamy.

"Okay, ground rules," Ian said, leaning forward. "You can't claim your own underwear. We can either open it up to all the swimming medals, not just gold, or we can let people get multiples off the same person if they won more than one medal."

"Make it both," Aaron said. "I mean, might as well go all the way, right? Gives us a bigger playing field."

"Some are worth more points, which we can figure out in a sec," Ian continued. "Winner is determined by points, not number of pairs. Um. Maybe someone should be writing this down? Tom? Lenny?"

"Dibs not me," Tom said immediately.

"Oh God," Lenny said morosely. " _Leonid, Leonid, sidel by ty doma, tochil svoi veretyona._ "

"Thanks, Lenny, you're the best," Ian said. "So. Anything else?"

"What about the way you get them? I mean, if you sleep with someone to get them, do you get more points? Because you _should_. Shouldn't we?" Ryan said.

"How are you gonna prove it?" Klete asked. "Matter of fact, how is any of this gonna get proved? How will we know someone's not just buying extra pairs at one of the stores or pawning their own off and claiming it's, whatever, Ian Thorpe's?"

"Thorpe's got his own damn brand, of course we're gonna know it's his. Anyway. Honor system. That's the way to go." Brendan was waving his hands around a lot. Michael kind of thought it made him look like a muppet. "Are you saying we don't trust each other?" 

And then there was a lot of squabbling and numbers getting tossed around, and Michael closed his eyes and zoned out a little while listening to Lenny grumble and scribble. At some point Gary must have woken up, because Michael could dimly hear him bitching about whether or not Ryk Neethling should be worth more than Roland Mark Schoeman, working out whether a gold in a relay was worth more than an individual bronze. The couch was comfortable. Ouzo was terrible, but also awesome. Terribly awesome. Possibly awesomely terrible.

He came back to attention in time to hear Laure Manaudou announced as being worth eighty points, and to narrowly avoid spilling the rest of the bottle on his crotch when Ian poked his thigh.

"You playing, Michael?" Ian asked.

Michael blinked. "Uh, yeah, I guess." He sat up, wondering if he'd missed his own point designation. "So, like, when are we gonna start?"

"How about right now?" Aaron said, and eight different people lunged really fast into Michael's personal space all at once; there was a lot of confused shoving, and about five hands got to third base with him within three seconds. In less than a minute it was all over; Michael flailed and yelled ineffectually, while Klete and Peter held him down, and Ryan stripped off his pants. 

"Fuckheads!" Michael yelled while Ryan paraded around the room triumphantly with Michael's underwear raised over his head, in a blatant disregard for relay teammate loyalty. "You're all going _down_ , assholes! You were in the _same fucking relay_!" 

"Hey, that was a group effort," Aaron said. "By all rights, you gotta split the points three ways."

Michael's only consolation was that they all jumped on Aaron right afterwards and started taking off his pants, and right after that, Gary figured out he had "I love cock" written all over his face, and the uproar doubled. So, it wasn't all bad.

Michael escaped during the confusion, freeballing it all the way back to his room where he immediately hid the rest of his underwear under Lenny's mattress. It wasn't ideal, but he'd find a better place later.

He needed a plan.

***

_Wednesday, August 25th, 1:23 PM_

Once he'd taken a cab back to his room on the cruise liner, showered, drank about a gallon of water, and felt a little more human, Michael went looking for Aaron back in the Village, because Aaron was good for big gay freakouts. He'd been around for Michael's first one in Sydney when Michael was flipping out over getting hard every time Ian Thorpe was in the same general vicinity. Aaron blew him, gave him a twenty minute combination lecture-puppet-show featuring three bananas and a hot dog, stuffed a handful of condoms in Michael's pocket, and shoved him in Ian's direction.

He was less help with big gay breakups, because after Melbourne when Michael and Ian's on-again off-again thing went down hard in flames and pissy interview quotes, Aaron's solution was to take him out to clubs, pour alcohol into him, and point out people that he thought looked like Ian. And when that surprisingly _didn't_ help, his next big idea was to keep buying booze for Michael, and then offer to blow him. Which would have been great if Aaron hadn't already bought him a shitload of alcohol and left Michael clutching the toilet bowl and unable to even think about getting it up, which totally killed his self-esteem and left him feeling worse than he had when the night began. 

Aaron kind of sucked sometimes.

He found Aaron down in the lounge, stretched out on the couch with his arm over his face. The television was on but muted, which was dumb because it was _Rocky II_ , and the whole point was the music.

"Is there a rule against sleeping with someone and also their siblings?" he asked, flopping down next to Aaron.

"If you touch Hailey I'll kill you," Aaron said conversationally. "Why, what's up?" 

"Nothing," Michael said. He fidgeted a little.

"Yeah, whatever," Aaron said. "What's up?"

"I think I might've slept with Pieter van den Hoogenband," Michael said. "Or maybe his brother. I'm not sure." He thought about it, flinched, and then tried to not think about it. "Uh. Maybe both of them."

"Successively or simultaneously?" Aaron asked. "By the way, that's kind of the other end of the spectrum than 'nothing', but okay, I can roll with it."

"I don't _know_ ," Michael said. 

He was sore and his ass hurt. That might have told him something, except he'd swam a fuckton of races over the last week and he didn't think there was any part of him that wasn't sore, let alone any specific parts that could have established whether or not he'd been part of a gay incestuous orgy. If it counted as an orgy. 

"How many people does it take to make an orgy?" he asked, because if there was anyone who'd know, it was Aaron.

"Five and up, I think," Aaron said. "Huh. You know, I didn't know Hoogie even had a brother."

"His name is Robert," Michael offered. "He plays water polo."

That pretty much exhausted Michael's own pool of knowledge, beside the fact that he might or might not be a briefs person. Speaking of which.

"I got his underwear, though." He prodded the plastic bag he'd brought with him. "What's Pieter worth, like, sixty?"

"More than that. Silver relay, silver and gold individuals, world record." Aaron reached out and looked in the bag. "But if you don't remember which one of them you slept with, how do you know whose underwear you stole? These could be Roger's."

"Robert's."

"Whatever. If it's not Pieter's, it doesn't count. No evidence, no points."

"There's, like, a fifty percent chance that they're his. Anyway, water polo is almost the same as swimming," Michael argued. "It's in a pool. You swim while you do it."

"I call bullshit," Aaron sing-songed at him. "No autograph, no pictures, no video, no witness. No points for Michael!"

"Fuck you," Michael muttered, and slumped. Aaron _sucked_.

"Cheer up, you must've had some kind of fun. With whichever of them it was. Or both." Aaron gingerly hooked the underwear out of the bag with one finger under the waistband. "I mean, there's a bunch of little van den Hoogenbands to-be in here too."

"What?" Michael said, and then sputtered when Aaron threw the shorts in his face. "Ew, dude, gross!"

"Hey, you fucked at least one of them," Aaron pointed out. "Don't be a prude about some used briefs. Anyway, normally you'd be in violation of the siblings rule, but that's overruled by the Olympics rule since anything goes at the Olympics, as long as it stays there. Like Vegas."

"What's the siblings rule?" Michael asked. He wondered if Aaron was making this up as he went along. It wouldn't be the first time.

"You can sleep with different siblings but not when they're both in the same zipcode. Unless it's twins, because that's okay."

"Why are twins okay?"

"Because it's _twins_ ," Aaron said. " _Inge_ has a twin. In fact, that was pretty much why the twins clause was invented."

"Okay." Michael tried to process that. "So, seriously, there's an anything goes at the Olympics rule?"

"That's the unspoken rule."

Michael frowned. "No one told me there was an unspoken rule." 

"That's kind of the point of an unspoken rule," Aaron said. "Oh, and you can't get involved with the Hamm twins. They're the exception to the sibling thing and the Olympic thing. Kind of like, opposite the Inge thing."

"You're a ton of help."

Aaron frowned as well. "Wait, which is the part here you're freaking out about? The not knowing which of them it was part, or the fact that they're related part?"

"Both, kind of." Michael scratched his stomach and winced. He had what were either some extremely localized bug bites or a mouthful of hickeys around his tattoo. "Wouldn't. You know. The related thing? Wouldn't that bug you?"

"No, not really," Aaron said promptly. Michael was rethinking asking Aaron for advice on anything. He probably should have remembered that Aaron had some kind of weird thing going with Brendan and Ian that might as well qualify as incest. 

"I mean, there's twins porn. That is, like, a not insubstantial niche of the porn market," Aaron continued. "So, as long as everyone's an adult and down with it, it's cool. I mean, I'm not the one related to them, so it wouldn't be _my_ issue. No reason to freak out."

"I think I might be an accessory to a gay incestuous hook-up," Michael said. "There are plenty of reasons to freak out."

Aaron ruffled his hair. "I wouldn't worry too much. This is Greece. Practically the whole culture is built on sodomy and incest."

Michael blinked. 

"For example, the creation myth of the Olympian gods deals with the union of the earth and the sky, where the earth gives birth to the sky, which then turns around and knocks the earth up so it can plonk out some Titans. And Zeus banged the hell out of most of his sisters, though his abduction of Ganymede was more like the erastes-eromenos relationship where an older man mentors a younger man so he can come of age."

Michael blinked again.

"You know, in a homosexual kind of way."

"How do you _know_ this shit?" Michael demanded.

"I'm just pretty awesome," Aaron said, very seriously.

***

_Sunday, August 22nd, 9:52 PM_

Word spread quickly, because the day after the contest had been proposed, all of the women's team knew, and most of them were actively participating. Michael got cornered by Amanda Beard and Kaitlin Sandeno at the vending machines, and had the scariest two minutes of his life trying to escape, way worse than swimming the two hundred free. Hitting girls wasn't cool; Hilary and Whitney would have had his ass for even thinking about it, but holy shit, Amanda was like the fucking Terminator chick from the third movie. She just didn't _stop_.

Someone had gotten to a computer and printed off the swimming medal results from Yahoo; the sheet was taped to a wall in the lounge. Names that had been fully collected were scribbled out with Lenny's green sharpie; anyone who wanted to mark off a name had to get it verified by Lenny, who seemed resigned to his fate, and was keeping track of who had collected from who. Lenny kept the standings list in the back of his team captain's notebook, and refused to share it, saying he would announce the current points standings every night. 

Michael had sneaked a look at it earlier. Erik was currently winning, but Aaron was only in second place by three points. Amanda was right behind him by a single point, because she'd sweet-talked Ryk into giving her his underwear, plus all the other pairs of the South African men's four hundred free relay team's shorts. That hadn't been a secret, because they'd all autographed the crotches.

The women got together and must have discussed further strategy, because suddenly every single American women's medal was off the list, multiples included; they'd all traded back and forth, and snatched the points in one fell swoop. Which sucked, but was also kind of awesome, because suddenly the wall was more interesting; it looked a lot more like a Victoria's Secret display, as opposed to the floor of a grungy college dorm room.

It wasn't safe to walk anywhere without checking to see who was lurking behind the next corner, or at least having a really good belt on. There was a brief period of time where everyone was going around commando to prevent run-by sneak attacks, but that stopped after the fifth public de-pantsing and Lenny screaming at the whole team in Russian for, like, an hour.

There were still a lot of ambushes, though, and alliances were being constantly made and broken. From the way Ian, Aaron, and Brendan were usually all huddled together, hissing urgently back and forth, Michael almost felt sorry for whatever was going to happen to Kosuke Kitajima. The poor bastard wasn't even going to know what hit him. 

"I'm gonna go move in and live on one of the cruise ships," Michael told Lenny, while hiding in the room and playing Madden. It was a brief hour of free time, snatched in between getting interviewed for something and getting ready for the next thing. "Sports Illustrated said they'd pay. I swear to God, if I have to toss Ryan out of here one more time, that's totally it."

"Mm," Lenny said. Onscreen, Lenny's safety viciously took Michael's fullback down in a move that would have probably been fatal in real life. Michael suspected Lenny hadn't killed anyone on the team yet because he was funneling all his stress over the repeated team public nudity into video game violence. 

"I'm _losing_ ," he said. "It sucks." Michael figured it was safe to whine a little as long as Lenny still had the controller in his hands. 

"Mm," Lenny said. He sacked Michael's quarterback again. "Yes, you are."

"No, I mean with the underwear thing." Michael button-mashed frantically for a few seconds. "It's not fair. I have to keep going to shit, and, you know, doing stuff and talking to people, and I don't have the time to work on it the way the others do. I was at the tennis clubs thingy when Erik bagged Kirsty Coventry's."

"I feel very badly that you are attending lavish sponsorship events and establishing your career and making hundreds of thousands of dollars," Lenny told him gravely, without looking at him. "It is a heavy burden for you, I know."

"You suck more than Aaron," Michael muttered. "And I don't have any underwear because everyone keeps fucking stealing it. I mean, that means they're probably in here touching your stuff, too."

"I gave most of my underwear to Peter," Lenny said. 

" _Dude_ ," Michael said, horribly appalled. 

"Carlisle," Lenny clarified. "Not Vanderkaay."

"That's kind of creepy," Michael said dubiously. "That's. I mean. I think that's above and beyond the call of duty for an agent."

"That's what makes him a _good_ agent," Lenny said. He was finally smiling a little, though it could have been due to the fact he was whipping Michael's ass twenty-seven to three in the game. Michael was never using the fucking Skins again.

Those weren't really the points he needed to be worrying about, though. He was somewhere around seventh or eighth in the standings, and that was mostly because he'd had two pairs of leftover IT briefs back from when he and Ian were still screwing in the shower after races. He'd brought them to Athens, intending to trade for his black hoodie that Ian had swiped at Barcelona and never given back. Sticky-fingered bastard. 

Lenny had also given him a pair of boxers after Michael begged him nonstop and promised all sorts of things he wasn't sure he could actually deliver for the upcoming Disney tour, like not playing his music out loud, and first dibs on the X-Box, and IHop stops on demand. Lenny had occasional bacon fixations.

The scoring system was totally convoluted anyway, a haphazard jumble of point designations that were worked out on based on medal type, number of medals, past medals, whether it was for an individual or a relay, whether there was a world record involved, procurement method, and nationality. And, in some specific cases, breast size.

Then there was the Inge clause. There'd been unanimous agreement that if anyone did manage to score just a single pair off Inge, the contest was over, wham, and whoever did it would be crowned winner by default.

With all the American women off the table, he was screwed because there just weren't that many easier options for him. Michael kept running the numbers through his head and watching Lenny toss his players around in extreme pixilated violence, until Lenny finally said, "We need to get ready for the Speedo party," and turned off the game.

"I just don't want to _lose_ ," Michael muttered, standing up. 

Lenny smiled at him, and tapped his shoulder lightly. " _Gol' na vydumku khitra_."

"Whatever the fuck that means," Michael muttered, and sighed. 

Speedo party. Grant would be there. Maybe Michael could appeal to him, remind him about what a good time they'd had training together on the Gold Coast. Inge would be there, too. Maybe he could pull off an upset.

Maybe pigs would fly.

***

_Wednesday, August 25th, 10:47 PM_

Michael spent the rest of day alternately giving interviews, freaking out in quiet corners, hiding from anyone wearing blue and orange, and barely refraining from punching Aaron, who kept sneaking up behind him and quoting lines from _Goldmember_.

"I vant everyone to have an Amsterdam good time," Aaron said lowly, and blew into Michael's ear.

"I will totally kill you and dump your body in the ocean," Michael threatened as calmly as he could, still trying to get his heart rate under control. "I can do it. Matt Lauer will lend me his boat."

"I love _gooooooold_ ," Aaron crooned, and then collapsed laughing.

Michael gave up holding himself back and punched Aaron; unfortunately, Aaron was so loose-limbed and helpless with laughter that it was like punching Jell-O. Ian walked in just as Michael was just looking around for something to throw at Aaron, but there actually wasn't too much to work with, except for things like his iPod that he didn't want to break, and things that would probably really hurt Aaron if they connected, and things that he couldn't actually lift. 

Ian looked at Aaron, followed Michael's line of gaze, and frowned. "Are you thinking of trying to kill Aaron with the couch?"

"No," Michael lied. 

"Because, you know, please don't," Ian said, and walked over. He toed Aaron carefully with his foot. "What's going on?"

"Aaron's being a jerk," Michael said.

Aaron looked up at him. "There are only two things I can't stand in this world," he said. "People who are intolerant of other people's cultures... and the Dutch."

"Michael hates Aaron, and Aaron hates the Dutch," Ian said. "Okay. I guess that isn't the weirdest thing I've heard today."

"You look very toit. Yesh, toit like a toiger. Yesh, yesh, yesh," Aaron said. He looked at Ian, paused, squinted, and switched back to his normal voice. "Hey. Wait. What are you wearing?"

"Clothes," Ian said, in the careful tones of someone who was used to dealing with unpredictable people. "I wear them sometimes. When I'm not swimming. I know this is strange for you, being from California and all, but in Maine it is occasionally cold, and we get into the habit." 

"You had a black Speedo shirt on before."

"Yeah, Aaron," Ian said kindly. "And sometimes I even wear different clothes. You can buy new ones in a store, or people give them to you. I switch off. It's really cool, give it a shot one of these days."

" _Speaking_ of switching off," Aaron said. "Michael has a funny story he really wants to tell you."

"No, I really don’t," Michael said, and immediately broke for the door, but Aaron lunged and grabbed him around the waist. He kept going anyway and dragged Aaron along for a few feet, who was doing his best to be a deadweight anchor. "Fucking off, Peirsol!"

"Uh." Ian stared at both of them, and took a step back. "Wow, I probably don't want to know, but where _is_ this going?"

"Michael possibly slept with Pieter, and possibly Pieter's brother, possibly at the same time," Aaron announced, as at the same time Michael said, "Nowhere, seriously, _leggo_."

"You slept with _Peter_?" Ian looked horribly appalled. "Why would you do that? He's your _agent_. He's _my_ agent!" 

"Jesus, fuck!" Michael shouted and sat down, partially on top of Aaron. "No. Not Carlisle. Van den Hoogenband. That Pieter."

"Pieter van den Hoogenband has a brother here?" Ian frowned. "I didn't know that."

"Yeah," Michael muttered, "there's a lot of that going around." 

"He does water polo," Aaron added, a little muffled. "Whatcha got there?"

"More points for me," Ian said, as he pulled the green sharpie out of his pocket and scribbled on the wall sheet. He surveyed the wall critically. "There any more push-pins?"

Aaron waved his hand as Michael scrambled to his feet. "Take a couple off Hall's pair, no one needs that many pins for a piece of cloth that small."

Ian nodded. For the first time, Michael realized Ian had something rolled up under his arm, a wad of black cloth that, when Ian shook it out, was a pair of boxers. He held them up at arm's length, peering at the wall. "What do you think?" he asked, "top right corner by Rosolino's, or down by Natalie's towards the middle?"

"Depends on if you want contrast or balance," Aaron said. He pulled himself up on the couch. "Me, I go by instinct."

"You're a sensitive artist, I know," Ian said. "Hey, give me a hand?" He handed Michael a couple pushpins, and then reached up to stretch the boxers against the wall. "Okay, pin 'em in place."

Michael shrugged and started shoving pins in at random. He tried to pull at the waistband to see the brand, but Ian made an impatient noise. "C'mon, my arms are killing me," he said, and Michael snorted and stabbed the last pin into the crotch. 

"Whose are those, anyway?" he asked. "How'd you get 'em?"

"I'm not giving away any secrets. That's bad tactics." Ian frowned. "Seriously, Pieter and Pieter's brother?"

"Whatever, I'll find out who you got from Lenny." Michael made another attempt at edging for the doorway, but Ian was blocking his path and Aaron was grinning again, so he let himself be towed back to the couch and trapped for what was sure to be a horribly uncomfortable discussion. Fuck.

"So, uh, did you get his underwear?" Ian asked instead, which, okay, was kind of not what Michael expected him to ask, but then again, all of this was Ian's fault in the first place.

"Yes," Michael said. "Maybe."

"No," Aaron said. "He doesn't remember, so there's no proof."

"Fucker, shut up."

Ian shrugged. "Aaron's right. Unless Lenny okayed it."

" _Lenny_ wanted to know if I used protection," Michael said shortly. And frankly, the less about that scarring conversation, the better.

"It's not just you, he asks everyone that," Ian said absently. "Seriously, how can you not remember which one of them it was? Because, I mean, if you were that drunk, then how the hell did you get it up in the first place? More than once, even?"

"They do look a lot alike. I checked online," Aaron said helpfully. "If you remember sucking more than one dick, that probably means you slept with both of them."

Honestly, it was mostly the condoms that made Michael about ninety percent sure he'd pulled a double. He could go pretty far on tapering and adrenaline and Gatorade, and maybe there was something to the whole Flying Dutchman nickname, but five condoms were five condoms and those were just the ones he'd found under the bed. 

Not like he was going to give out details like that to Ian and Aaron, though.

Michael rested his chin on one fist. "I've kind of been trying not to think about it too much."

"There's your first problem right there," Aaron said. "You gotta man up and concentrate really hard on your memories of van den Hoogenband genitalia, because otherwise I don't see the two hundred free being much fun for you after this. Did you pitch or catch?" 

"You don't remember any, like, details?" Ian scratched his neck, and then gestured vaguely towards his crotch. "Not even anything, you know... intimate?" 

"Even if I do, I mean. What the hell do I even do with that?" Michael flailed his hands around a little. "Like, do I try to seduce them both again to see who it compares to?"

Aaron perked up. "You remember seducing them both?"

" _No_ , Jesus, I didn't go to the Sports Illustrated party planning on any of this! I figured Pieter could maybe get me into Inge's room, and instead I wake up and it's all Dutch incest, and there are apparently unspoken rules about that and shit!" 

"Is it incest if they're just having sex with a common third?" Ian frowned. "I think that's just being really good at sharing."

"Maybe it was some kind of Dutch family bonding activity," Aaron suggested.

Michael thought he might be having another breakdown. This would be the fourth of the day, so far. He took a couple deep breaths and tried to think of Eminem lyrics, and not of all the weird places on his body where he kept finding hickeys.

"Hey Mike," Aaron said suddenly, "I talked to Ian, you know, Thorpe, not you Ian, during the Access Hollywood interview at the party last night, and he wants his underwear back."

"No way," Michael said automatically, "he's got my hoodie. And he's been an asshole about pretty much, you know, everything."

"He feels bad about that," Ian said. "I heard. You should talk to him, and clear the air."

"Heard where?" Michael asked, studying the area on the wall where he'd pinned Ian's IT underwear, both pairs together like the world's weirdest butterfly. He should have pinned them up in his bedroom, but there was pinning Ian Crocker's picture up, and then there was pinning Ian Thorpe's underwear up, and the media had already gone nuts over the former. Michael had some maybe-kind-of stalking issues; he acknowledged that to himself but hell if he had to add any more fuel to the fire.

Ian waved his hand. "Wherever. I mean, he might know what Pieter's… looks like."

"He still likes Pieter better," Michael muttered. "He'll probably just laugh." 

"Would you like a shmoke und a pancake?" 

"I would like you," Michael said grimly, "to shut up and never talk again. Also, your accent sucks."

"Well, then there ish no pleashing you," Aaron said. "Anyway, you could drink some more."

"Drinking got me into this." Michael turned his head and glared. "And Crocker."

"I really think your sluttish tendencies towards your competitors got you into this," Aaron said thoughtfully.

Michael punched Aaron again. There was a long silence, minus Aaron grumbling.

"This is what happens," Ian announced to the ceiling, "when the entire aquatic sports world is made up of two-beer queers."

"It’s the chlorine," Aaron said. "It does something to your brain. If it helps, I think there’re still some straight guys in the marathon swim."

Michael put his head back against the couch and sighed.

***

_Monday, August 23nd, 1:17 AM_

En Plo had strings of tiny twinkly lights everywhere, wound along the railings and looped back and forth across the ceiling, everywhere from the dance floors and balconies and down into the waterfront where the water made the reflections shimmer like thousands of little coins thrown out in handfuls. It was like walking through the sky, surrounded by stars.

It was great, except his ex was totally cockblocking him. What made it worse was that Ian wasn't even doing it deliberately. Probably.

The club itself was closed off to the media, so he'd had to wade through a crowd of camera flashes and people shouting random questions at him in a variety of accents, just to get inside. Lenny towed him along like a steadfast Russian tugboat, which was weirdly comforting, and occasionally made him stop for a picture; they made better time than if they'd just tried to push all the way through. 

"Be good," Lenny said sternly as soon as they got inside. He bought Michael a beer, slapped him on the back, and abandoned him to go talk to Jenny Thompson.

Michael had zeroed in on Grant as soon as he'd gotten his drink. Unfortunately, Ian was also over there and he wasn't sure if he wanted to take Ian on outside the medal stand without someone else there who could pick up Michael's slack whenever Ian inevitably fired off one of his stupidly articulate not-precisely-an-insult-but-still comments. Normally Grant would have been fine for that; usually he didn't put up with Ian's shit either, but they were laughing together and Michael wasn't willing to risk it.

Ideally, Michael would have hauled over Lenny or Tom, who looked out for him most of the time or Klete, who had his own agenda against Ian for the four hundred free, and knew how to brawl. Or, hell, Amanda, who could probably put Ian on the run just by raising her eyebrows and smiling. But then he'd owe her a favor and that was kind of terrifying to contemplate.

Anyway, Ian and Grant and a couple of the other Australian team members had been doing some sort of elaborate and insanely complicated drinking game in the corner that looked like a combination of body shots and setting things on fire, and Michael figured he should wait until that calmed down. Nicholas Sprenger already had a singed eyebrow.

Michael settled back against the bar, drank his beer, and kept an eye out for anyone else on his shortlist for the evening. 

Two hours later, Grant was nowhere to be found, and Inge had had an impenetrable crowd of people six-deep around her at all times, and Ryan had talked Michael into trying the same thing the Australians had been doing, only with further modifications involving tequila worms because Ryan was crazy. And drunk. And crazy.

"You're, like, _on fire_ ," Michael told him, batting at his shirt.

"Yeah, we fucking rocked this place," Ryan said.

"No, _really_ , dude," Michael insisted, and Ryan said, "Oh fuck, you're right, hang on," so Michael dumped a beer on Ryan and put him out before Lenny could come over and cut them off from the bar like he had threatened to earlier.

"That was _my_ beer," Ryan complained. 

"Yeah, you're all welcome and all that." Michael drew a smiley face in the spilled liquid on the tabletop. He looked around the room. "This is Speedo, but there's, like, people from all the other companies here too."

"And MTV. It's a lovefest, dude." Ryan slapped both hands down on the table. "You know, we should totally be doing karaoke. We should start a _band_. You and me and. And Speedo."

Michael was simultaneously confused and intrigued by the logic of how Ryan got to that idea, enough that he didn't even protest when Ryan stole the last three swallows of Michael's drink. "Ian plays the guitar," he finally offered. "The good Ian. Not the other Ian."

Ryan's eyes got all round and he looked like he'd had the mother of all epiphanies. "He can be, like, the guitarist with _mystique_ ," he said and got to his feet, only swaying a little. "C'mon, we have to go find him. Like, now."

Michael trailed after Ryan while Ryan went looking for Ian, sipping his drink and keeping an eye out for Grant. He didn't see him anywhere. He was concentrating so hard on looking, that he walked right into someone else and only barely kept from spilling his drink everywhere. 

"Sorry," he said automatically, and then registered that it was Pieter van den Hoogenband. "Uh. Hi." 

Pieter gave him a polite smile. "Hello," he said. He had very white teeth. Michael figured if Pieter ever stopped swimming, he could probably advertise toothpaste. And his mouth was kind of… mouthy. Full. Red. Though that might have just been the contrast of his teeth, all of which showed when he smiled.

He didn't realize he was staring until Pieter cocked his head slightly. "Are you well?" he said, with a slight questioning tone on the end of it.

"Uh," Michael said blankly. 

" _I am a golden god_!" Ryan yelled, from somewhere across the room, and possibly on a balcony. Shit. 

"I have to go now," Michael said, and smiled again, nervously. "Uh. Bye. Um, congratulations. Again."

"Thank you," Pieter said, sounding a little bemused. "You also. Goodbye."

Halfway across the room, Michael realized that he'd just thrown away a perfect opportunity to talk to someone who might be able to get him within Inge-range, or to go after Pieter's underwear. Except he'd never had a good read on Pieter, and Pieter didn't give much away to be read. He didn't even know where to begin; Pieter was a blank wall. With, apparently, really nice teeth.

In the meantime, there were other more pressing things. Ryan wasn't actually up on the balcony railing, but he had one leg up and it looked like he was thinking about it, or possibly deciding whether or not he needed to vomit. 

"Down, dude," he told Ryan, and tugged; Ryan obligingly toppled down against Michael, putting them both in a heap against the wall. It was surprisingly comfortable, even though Ryan was heavy as fuck, and smelled like sweat and beer and singed cloth. His hair got into Michael's mouth, and he spat it out. "Pah."

"I can't find Ian," Ryan said sadly. "Our Speedo band is gonna suck."

"S'all right, man." Michael thought about getting up, but what the fuck did it matter; Grant wasn't around, and Inge was untouchable, and Pieter was weird, and he was supposed to be doing something with Matt Lauer in a couple of hours. He yawned. Sleep suddenly seemed like a good idea. "We've got. Like. Options."

"Yeah. S'cool. No band." Ryan yawned as well, contagious. "No Ian. Other Ian. We can design underwear. Instead of stealing it."

"Nnngh," Michael muttered, unwilling to think about Ian any more. Though, hey. He poked Ryan's side, fingers lingering on the waistband of his pants. "Are you…?"

"I'm riding free and easy," Ryan said with distinct pride. "Ha."

Damn. Well, it had been worth a shot.

Ryan gave off approximately as much heat as a small furnace, and his head weighed like a bowling ball on Michael's stomach. The hair helped cushion it, though. He needed a haircut, or to do something with the whole mess of curls. Michael had let Jamie cut his hair, back at trials. He missed Jamie. Pieter's hair curled when it got long, but it never looked messy. He probably used product, or some other super-expensive Dutch thing, made out of. Tulips. Or something.

The rest of the party bled out in a comfortable haze of music and lights, so many twinkling lights. Michael watched the lights and petted Ryan's hair a little until Lenny came looking for him, and loaded him into a cab that would take him off to his new room at the cruise liner. 

He staggered to bed, fell asleep, and didn't wake up until Hilary came pounding on his door, yelling "Rise and shine, kiddo!"

Michael had to spend practically the whole day with Matt Lauer touring the Gulf, which consisted of water and more water; he also had to pose for another billion pictures and do a corny staged race, but he got to steer a yacht, and hey, that was something.


	2. Part 2

_Thursday, August 26th, 7:22 PM_

Ian and Brendan came into the cafeteria while Michael was hanging out and waiting to leave for the US women's soccer match final. Michael waved. Once his tray was loaded down, Ian ambled over and Michael hitched his way down the bench to make more room. Peter had given both of them and Lenny an update on the Disney tour earlier, told them some specs about the bus and dates and locations, and Michael figured he should probably get start getting used to having Ian within roughly three feet of him at any given time.

"Hey," Ian said, sitting down across from him. "Thought you were going to the soccer game."

"Soon," Michael said, and tried to steal some of Ian's fries. Ian jabbed him with his fork. "Ow. Ass."

"Sorry," Ian said, not sounding sorry at all. They'd walked lightly around each other for a day or so after the end of swimming, aware that they'd shifted boundaries after the medley relay, and wary of pushing too hard against the new lines. Even if the lines were sort of closer, now. But the Speedo picnic had gone okay, much less painful than they both figured it might be, and things were settling. Even though Ian was the causing factor of Michael's Big Gay Maybe-Incest Dutch Sexcapades.

"It wasn't incest," Ian remarked, and carefully placed some meat slices in the center of his pita.

Michael jerked in his seat. "What?" he said, hoping like hell he hadn't been thinking out loud.

"You're sort of—" Ian made a vague gesture with his pita, "twitching. Your face. It's kind of obvious. You're not related to Pieter. Or Pieter's brother. It's not incest in the technical sense; it's just possibly bad judgment. So just stop. Before you give yourself an aneurysm and we have to cancel the Swim with the Stars tour."

Michael just stared at Ian for a few seconds. "Okay," he said slowly, stretching out the syllables as much as he could. "I'll just be completely fine with it. Right now. Absolutely nothing is wrong."

"Good," Ian said, and immediately jabbed him again with his fork when Michael tried for another fry; Michael snatched his hand back and said, " _Ow_ , fuck, Crocker."

"What's wrong now?" Brendan asked, putting a tray on the table and sitting down next to Ian.

"I'm not sharing my fries," Ian said. He took another bite of his gyro. "Also, he's upset because he got drunk at the Sports Illustrated party, and now he doesn't know if he slept with Pieter, Pieter's brother, or both Pieter and Pieter's brother."

"You slept with _Peter_?" Brendan looked horribly appalled. "And his _brother_? You had a Vanderkaay _orgy_? Holy fuck, what?"

"It's not an orgy with just three people," Michael said, and then, "Oh my God, shut up, what," and he contemplated just banging his head against the table and putting himself out of his misery, fuck the Disney Tour and sponsorship and Beijing and Spitz.

"No, but almost," Ian said. "Van den Hoogenband, not Vanderkaay. You know, from the Netherlands." 

"He's got a brother?" Brendan asked. "I didn't know that. In swimming?" 

"Water polo," Ian said. "But not competing here."

"Is everyone gonna know about this?" Michael demanded. 

"You told Aaron, so yeah, probably." Ian tilted his head a little. "Seriously, you should know better by now."

"Narc," Michael muttered. "Both of you. You and Aaron."

"Here, have some fries," Ian said, so Michael decided to forgive him for a few minutes, and grabbed a handful before Ian could take them back. Ian stuck his spoon in the tzatziki and started spreading it inside another pita.

Brendan gave him a curious look. "I'm guessing this was somehow related to the underwear thing. Or have you always had a thing for Dutch double dipping?" Ian put up his hand and high-fived Brendan without looking up or stopping his gyro assembly at all; Michael grabbed another handful of fries in retribution, as well as a bunch of grapes from Brendan's tray. 

"Yeth," he said thickly through a mouthful. Huh. Not as bad a taste combination as he'd expected. 

"Yeah what?"

Michael swallowed hard. "Yeah, underwear."

"How many points?"

"Can't prove they're Pieter's," Ian murmured, still painstakingly involved in getting the exactly right proportion of tomatoes to onions.

"Did you check to see if there was anything on the tag in the back?" Brendan asked. 

Michael stopped swishing his fry through the ketchup. Ian looked up. They looked at Brendan, then at each other. 

Brendan shook his head. "Man, it's a good thing Lenny's going with you guys on the Disney tour. At least one of you'll have a brain."

That was uncalled for, but Michael ignored it and stood up. "You're carrying them around with you?" Brendan asked. 

"No, they're on the wall, I just didn't get points yet." But he could, if there really was something that could prove it. Lenny might even be around, and he could verify it. He might be able to jump into the top three point standings before the end of tonight. 

What Brendan said caught up with him. "What the hell, do you carry Ian and Aaron's around with you?"

Brendan snorted. "That would be a bitch to explain to the security check point."

Which, Michael thought, was totally not an answer to what he'd asked. Not at all. 

"Fine. Let's hit the wall, dude," Michael said.

"I'm still eating," Ian said mildly, and Michael sat down again and reached over. Ian sighed, but didn't try to keep Michael away from his plate. 

Twenty minutes later, Michael was unpinning maybe-Pieter's boxer briefs from the wall (lower left corner, below Markus Rogan and above Federica Pellegrini, green plaid boxers and green lace thong respectively) and all three of them were squinting at the tag.

"Is that a P or an R?" Brendan finally asked. 

Ian flicked the tag with his forefinger. "Could be either." 

"It's totally a P," Michael said. 

"There's a bit that sticks out, though." Brendan traced it in the air above the tag. "That could be an R."

"It's just marker bleed. Oh, come on," he said when Ian and Brendan looked at each other and shook their heads in unison. 

"Man, I'd just ask him already. You're past the cut-off date where you could send flowers," Brendan said. "It's gonna be worse if you don't know. Either you did both of them and they both know it, or you only did one of them and they just have really low privacy thresholds. Just bite the bullet and find out so that you don't have to worry about it for later."

"Easy for you to say." Michael pinned it back to the wall, shoving the pins in with more force than was strictly necessary. "What would you do if this was you?"

"I wouldn't be in this situation to start with." Brendan grinned, a little toothily. "But if someone slept with my baby sister and ran off with her underwear, I'd be sure to kick his ass. So, you should probably find out how Pieter stands on the issue." 

"Robert's older than I am!" Michael protested. He'd seen the driver's license. "I'm totally the victim here."

"Then maybe you could get your sisters to go after Pieter instead," Brendan said. He looked at Ian. "Are you still going to go…?"

"Yeah, but not for too long," Ian said. "I should be back in time to meet up with you guys. Is that cool with you?"

"Olympic rule," Brendan said. "I'ma go see if Nate wants to come out with us also. Aaron said he was asking. We can wait for you or just meet you there." He patted Ian's shoulder, and then Michael's as well. "I hope you find peace among the Dutch tulips."

"Bite me," Michael said.

"That's interesting," Ian said, when they were walking outside. He had his guitar slung over his back.

"What is?" Michael tried to speed up, but Ian just lengthened his strides.

"That you haven't really tried to figure it out yet," Ian replied, as calm as if he were talking about the weather. " _Really_ tried, I mean. You compete with anything that moves. Even if you weren't trying to win the contest, you’re kind of a total stalker."

"Fuck you, I am not," Michael said indignantly. "I am—I am focused. And passionate. Ask anybody."

"Like Pieter?" Ian said. "Anyway. You keep flipping out about the brothers thing, but you won’t just man up and find out, which means you’re freaked about not only the answer but also about just talking to one of them. I just don’t know which of them freaks you out. The one you don’t really know, or the one you kind of know but never talk to."

"I don’t really know _either of them."_

"Maybe you want to." Ian shrugged. "Or maybe you do know the answer and you’re embarrassed. Like I said, interesting."

Michael scratched his neck, and thought about it. "You're wrong," was all he could come up with, since he’d been using "shut up" a lot over the past two days and it hadn’t seemed to help much.

"Hey, look, there's Pieter," Ian said, and Michael jerked his head around to see so quickly that the muscles in his neck throbbed in a flash of hot, rubbery pain; he saw Peter Carlisle walking towards them and waving, probably so that they could leave for the soccer match. 

"You suck _out loud_ ," he told Ian.

"Just try to get this all resolved before the Disney tour, because I can only do a certain number of spontaneous chick-flick moments," Ian replied. He waved back to Peter, got up, and walked away before Michael could come up with a good retort.

Michael was beginning to think that all people named Ian were somehow innately able to do annoying shit like that. 

***

_Tuesday, August 24th, 2:01 PM_

Michael arrived at the beach for the Speedo Athlete Beach Day just minutes after Inge apparently rolled up in the red and white stretch Mini, complete with inside Jacuzzi and tinted windows, that Speedo had been randomly chauffeuring its athletes around in. It was very distracting and explained why he actually managed to get to the food table and eat almost half a sandwich before a small phalanx of reps yanked him away and made him get as naked as public decency laws allowed.

Speedo events, while fun, usually left Michael feeling sort of like a Barbie doll, with someone from the company dictating precisely what he should wear, where to stand, what to hold, how to pose, who to pose with, and all the other details that went with allowing the media to obtain what would be advertised as Speedo-sponsored athletes caught in spontaneous moments of wholesome fun that involved lots of tanned skin, defined abs, and medals. What clothing they did get to keep on was suitably trademarked.

"Can we get a better expose on the rings tattoo?" someone asked, and the aide Peter had sent with him immediately stuck his hand in Michael’s shorts and tugged them down further. 

A few feet away, Grant was trying to spin a blue and yellow volleyball on his finger while another aide vainly tried to do something to his head to minimize glare off his current chrome-dome appearance. Michael figured it couldn’t have been easy for her, considering Grant was a foot and a half taller than she was. Natalie was patiently letting three different people put her hair in a state of artful disarray.

Amanda was sifting through the pile of logo-emblazoned props that Speedo was having them hold. She picked up a wooden paddle and turned it over thoughtfully in her hands; Michael made a mental note to stay as far away from her as possible in the group picture. In fact, he concentrated on that so much, that he somehow ended up next to Inge out of sheer luck, and the fact they had been given the same color outfits. Inge’s shorts just had about eighty percent less fabric to them.

"You look very nice, Michael," Inge told him with a smile.

Michael was painfully aware that he had just broken out in a sweat all over his body that had nothing to do with the heat of the day, and he tried to make a casual 'I have eight Olympic medals and am not involved in a team-wide competition to steal your intimate apparel’ smile. 

"Thanks," he said. "You look—awesome."

"I like this clothing line very much. I hope they put it out in the catalogue soon," Inge said, smoothing her hands down over her sides and thighs. Michael’s gaze helplessly followed the same path, and then he jerked it upwards to her face before she could catch him gaping.

At least it made the photo session more interesting than usual. Pictures were easier than commercials, even though the acting involved in the commercials was minimal at best; mostly they just wanted him to take off his clothes and splash around. Not that that was much different from pictures, but taking pictures meant he didn't have to worry about remembering lines or getting molested by a dolphin. 

It was kind of cool to see himself on television the first time, but it was sort of disappointing too, now that he knew about all the green screens and film editing and what things actually looked and sounded like before people got done overlaying music and different camera shots and special effects. 

They posed for the big group picture before Speedo finally let them break to eat, and then started pulling them out for smaller group and individual shots. Despite his best efforts, Amanda and Grant both got him on the ass with paddles. They had him take a couple photos with just Inge, and Michael grinned so hard his face hurt, as he silently thanked God, and any Greek gods that might be hanging out in the vicinity. It never hurt to cover all the bases.

Speedo took relaxing and the documentation of said relaxing as serious business. After an hour or so, most of the journalists were politely herded away, and the security guards (looking horribly out of place and uncomfortable in their suits and radio-earpieces) loosened up slightly, and let everyone move more than five feet away from the picnic area.

Michael and Ian started a game of beach volleyball against Grant and Michael Klim. Height-wise they were all fairly evenly matched, but both Michael and Klim kept reacting in the wrong direction whenever someone yelled their name.

"Too bad Thorpey’s not one of us," Grant said, after the third time Michael and Klim had nearly collided. "Klimmy and him could face off against you two and we’d really have an interesting time of it. Battle royale. The two of you taking on another sport."

Ian just laughed, and hooked an arm around Michael's shoulders in a brief almost-hug. Michael was kind of relieved. Speedo had made them pose together from pretty much every angle to get their fill of _look-aren’t-we-good-friends-and-teammates_ pictures. That was awkward, but still not as bad when they had to spend five hours together getting fake gills glued onto their necks for the Speedo Fastskin advertisements, and deflecting questions about the hundred fly. They were already kind of friends; it just looked like Speedo wanted them to be _better_ friends. Michael thought they might even be able to do that for real, at some point.

The volleyball game was eventually abandoned in favor of a battle-of-the-sexes handstand competition, which the women totally won. Michael kind of figured that losing because none of guys could stay up in the air longer than three seconds since they were all watching Inge, Natalie, Jenny, and Amanda _bounce_ and then simultaneously bend over and kick their legs up in the air, was still a win when it came down to it. 

By half past four, Speedo was letting them _actually_ relax, and they weren't required to do much more than lie around in chairs or on the sand, sated with sun and food. Michael sprawled on a towel and occasionally threw ice cubes at Tom. A couple chairs away, Ian and Grant were talking to each other about guitars and surfing respectively, in parallel conversations that didn’t seem to have any bearing or points of intersection with each other, but still seemed to make sense to the two of them.

A shadow fell over Michael. He looked up and saw Inge lit up by the sun and plucking at one of her bikini straps, and his heart kind of stopped for a few seconds. "I am leaving now," she said. "I must get ready for the party."

"Oh." Michael stared, mesmerized by the way her fingers were just playing with the strap, sliding it down over the ball of her shoulder, back up, and—was that side-boob? 

"You know about the party, right, Mikey?" Amanda was suddenly there behind Inge, smiling at him in a way that boded no good. She'd been out in the water earlier but she'd somehow managed to keep her makeup perfect; there were beads of moisture just sliding all the way down the valley of—

"You will go to the Sports Illustrated party later today, yes?" Inge continued.

"Yes?" Michael said, a little hazily, and then tried to make it sound like less of a question. "Yes."

"He needs to unwind," Amanda told Inge, very solemnly. "We all do."

"That is wonderful. You should come have fun with our team," Inge said. She smiled. Her eyes were the same color as the ocean. "We will have a celebration drink," she called back over her shoulder as she walked away.

"Uh," Michael was frozen to the spot in combined fear and _oh-fuck-yes_. "Okay," he said, a good thirty seconds after Inge had already walked away.

Amanda lingered for a few seconds, openly smirking now. "See you at the party, Michael," she said, and then walked after Inge, extra sway in her steps.

"Okay," Michael said dumbly again.

"Breathe," Tom advised him. "And you're in deep over your head, boy. I'm just saying."

***

_Friday, August 27th, 4:31 PM_

On Friday, he got to sleep in until half past noon and somehow got back on speaking terms with his ex, both of which had once seemed impossible goals to achieve. Thorpe had actually been downright friendly in the locker room after the two hundred free, full of ass-slapping camaraderie, then the eight hundred free relay had happened and things got cold and awkward and hyper-polite again. But at the Omega photo shoot, Alexander Popov kept switching places to put Michael and Ian next to each other, and staring meaningfully at both of them, and generally being charming and reproachful, until it finally seemed really petty to keep ignoring each other.

Afterwards, Alexander hugged both of them, smiled, and said, " _Mir da lad — bol'shoy klad_."

"He and Lenny could rule the world if they wanted to," Michael said, watching him walk away. "It's like, a Russian thing."

"No kidding," Ian said, and shook his head. "C'mon, mate, he's got the right idea. No more fighting. Let's go catch up."

"Are you sure you don't want to, you know, make a statement about it to the press first," Michael asked, and ducked when Ian swiped at his head. 

There were political protestors and police apparently using tear gas on the protestors outside the Village, so Peter called and told him to stay in the Village for now and he’d get tickets for the basketball game against Argentina later that night. There were enough restaurants inside the Village to choose from and they ran into Grant along the way, so all three of them ended up crowded around a tiny table in the back of one of the quieter places. The food was good, especially the fried calamari, which kept them all friendly for the first half of the meal and which was probably why Michael didn’t immediately spit it out on the table when Ian said, "So, Aaron says you slept with Pieter and Pieter's brother."

"Aaron got a head injury from a flipturn during the Palo Alto camp," Michael said, after swallowing the lump of calamari in his throat. "It makes him tell lies, like, all the time."

"He meant Robert, right?"

"All the time. Like, pathologically."

"I heard he plays water polo," Grant said, and Michael kicked him hard under the table. "Ow," Ian said.

"Can't we just eat and not talk about this?" Michael asked hopelessly.

"No," Ian said. "Seriously, both of them?"

"Dunno." Ian just kept eyeballing him. Michael scowled, because Ian probably would talk to Pieter, and then he'd have to do even more damage control. "Pieter was in the bed. Robert was in the shower. There were, like, condoms. Olympic rule. Okay?"

Grant just laughed. "Good on you, mate."

"Did you just invoke the unspoken rule?" Ian made his bitch-face. "You can't just invoke an unspoken rule in conversation."

"Yeah, and I like how you can't just remember how this is totally none of your business," Michael said.

"This is _Pieter_ ," Ian said. "And Robert," he added, like an afterthought. "I like Pieter. And if you did this to dick him over, if you're doing this because of me—" 

"Not _everything_ is about you, asshole," Michael said, loud enough to make the bartender look up.

And so of course they started arguing, bringing up all the things that never made it out into the media, but that had done just as much if not more for the rivalry than the actual swimming, voices raised and lowered appropriately whenever the waitress came back to the table. Ian said Michael was an obnoxious famewhore brat with stalking problems, and Michael called Ian an Olympic pedophile who made people gay against their will. They fought over which of them was more popular in Japan, and then Michael said he wanted his hoodie back, and Ian said that it was an ugly piece of clothing anyway, and Michael told Ian his underwear line was even uglier and lacked proper ball support.

Occasionally the argument would manage to ricochet briefly back to Pieter and Robert, before it would go back to the degrading of personal appearances and split times. 

It went on for so long that both of them used up nearly all of their usual insult material. By the end of the meal, when the waitress came by with baklava and then left again, they had managed to take it down a notch out of sheer fatigue, and only threatened each other vaguely with honey-clogged warnings as they stuffed themselves with pastry.

"Don't do it again like that," Ian said, and swirled one finger around the plate for filo crumbs. "He deserves better than that."

"Yeah, I'll put that in my day planner," Michael muttered. "No more gay incestuous sex with the van den Hoogenbands."

Ian twitched and said, "Christ, don't put those words together like that." Ian had been glancing at Grant when he wasn't insinuating that Michael jerked off to necrophiliac octogenarian porn, and he suddenly rounded on Grant. "That's not your shirt."

Grant had been following them back and forth like a tennis match, and he looked momentarily blank at the attention being turned on him. He looked down and poked the Speedo logo on his own chest. "It's a shirt." 

Michael looked as well. It did seem vaguely familiar, though that could have been because he hadn’t worn a pair of clothing without a Speedo logo on it over the past two weeks. 

"I thought you were wearing a white Speedo shirt last night."

Grant reached across the table and patted Ian's hand. "You've been partying too hard, mate."

"Did I really turn you gay?" Ian asked Michael.

"You totally didn't help," Michael muttered, and then sighed because that was unfair and Ian looked twitchy and neurotic, and Michael needed him to stay in swimming and not have another meltdown over his weird sexuality issues that would take forever and another coach change to resolve. "Whatever, you didn't break me, I like tits too. And it's okay, because Aaron was actually the first one to blow me in Sydney, not you." 

"You lied about that?" Ian stopped looking guilty, and started looking annoyed again. "You made a big deal about that. You followed me around and said you wanted me to be the first, because you were _afraid_ —" Michael made a noise of baklava-muffled outrage, "—of it being anyone else. I gave in _because_ you kept saying that."

"Oh, what, it took you like five minutes to get over your morals, and put your dick up my ass!" Michael hissed back. 

"I don't need to _lie to people_ to get them to have sex with me," Ian said self-righteously, and Michael said, "Yeah, you only lie _about_ sleeping with them," and Ian said, "Grow up and get over yourself," and Michael said, "Okay, you know what, you _did_ turn me gay, you totally _did_ , it's all your fault and Aaron's blowjob was still _way better_ than yours." 

And then it was on again until Grant slipped away, and the waitress that came to refill their water glasses said that the tall gentleman with the shaved head had left, but he had told her that his two friends were so excited about their Olympic victories, that they wanted to pay the tab for everyone else in the restaurant. So they stopped insulting each other long enough to insult and plan revenge on Grant.

"Stop avoiding Pieter and talk to him," Ian told him, when they finally extracted themselves from the restaurant. Michael opened his mouth, and Ian shook his head. "Even if it was just Robert, it's still going to involve Pieter."

"I don't want to talk to Pieter," Michael said, fully aware of how sulky he sounded, and still unable to do anything about it. "He doesn’t like me."

"Pieter wouldn't have had sex with you if he didn't like you." Ian paused and made a face. "Well, actually, yes, he would. But he would have hunted you down by now to make you feel uncomfortable about it, and he definitely wouldn't have let Robert get involved."

"I don't know if there was—" Michael flapped his hand around and resisted the urge to make air quotes. "Involvement. I'm not sure."

"Then either Pieter doesn't hate you, or you didn't have sex with his brother, either of which solves your problem." 

"What if it was just Robert?" 

Michael was pretty sure asking Ian for advice on his fucked-up sex life was a bad habit to be getting back into, considering where it had once led, but no one from his own country was helping and Ian apparently had insider knowledge.

"Then you talk to Robert, and apologize for the fact you did a runner after sleeping with him." Ian held up a hand, forestalling him. " _Then_ , you either go back to the States and get on with your life, _or_ you ask him for another round, _or_ you move in with him and play water polo until you've got a bloody gold medal in that. I don't know. You have to figure out what _you_ want."

"I know exactly what I want," Michael said. "It's kind of the opposite of what you're telling me to do."

"Tough," Ian said. "Also, I want my underwear back."

"Like hell," Michael said.

"I have Pieter's mobile number," Ian said. "You wouldn't actually have to talk to him face to face."

"Fine, you can have one pair back," Michael said.

***

_Tuesday, August 24th, 10:31 PM ___

One long party. That was what the week was turning into, with occasional transformations into one really fucking long interview, and Michael figured he'd get tired of it eventually, but not yet. The Sports Illustrated party was if anything, even more elaborate than the Speedo one; since it wasn't restricted just to swimming, he was only recognizing the occasional face.

Someone had had the bright idea to make _themed_ drinks; five different people had given him Golds within half an hour of arrival and he had no idea what was in them for the most part, except apparently a shitload of rum. The Silvers smelled like they had tequila in them; the Bronzes were downright dangerous looking, kind of murky. He'd seen at least three different brown liquors going in.

He still had an undrunk Gold sitting next to him from Petria Thomas, another one from Gary Hall Jr. that he wasn't drinking because he wouldn't put it past Gary to have spit in it, and half a highball glass full of Goldschlager and topped with a pink cocktail umbrella that he didn't know where the hell had come from. It was kind of pretty. To his left, Aaron and Brendan were having an argument, with occasional random interjections by Ryan and Ian.

"No, dude, fuck," Aaron was saying. "Mayor McCheese is only a _figurehead_ leader. I mean, we all know who's really running McDonaldland, and it's not a guy with a giant cheeseburger for a head, it's the clown."

Brendan crossed his arms. "He has the title. And a sash. Mayor McCheese wears a suit, with a waistcoat and _spats_. He clearly takes thought and pride in his appearance for the job."

"He has a _cheeseburger_ for a _head_."

Ian shrugged as he reached around Aaron for the bowl of peanuts. "You know, that could have been just a really unfortunate genetic condition that he parlayed into a political career," he said.

"It's messed up. Why didn't the Hamburglar ever, like, knock him down and take a bite out of his head? That'd be easier than trying to steal shit all the time."

"Because it's treason to eat the mayor, jackass, that's why," Brendan said.

"It's _McDonaldland_. Like, Ronald McDonald. The whole thing is named after him. Whereas Mayor McCheese is just, you know, a mayor, so logically all he can be in charge of is a town or something. He's a moron."

"I'd rather have a sentient cheeseburger in charge than a creepy-ass clown with possible pedophiliac leanings," Brendan said.

"It's not about what you'd rather have, it's about how things _are_." Aaron banged his fist down; peanuts scattered. "Mike, you agree, right?"

Michael momentarily stopped looking at the gold flakes swirling around in the glass. "Huh?"

"Just say yes, or I'll tell everyone that thing you did in Sydney with, with, you know, the stuffed koala toy. I still have the pictures."

"You said you burned all of those," Michael said.

"I say a lot of things," Aaron said.

"What I wanna know," Ryan said, lifting his head up from where it had been resting on his arms, "what, what I wanna know is Grimace. I mean, what the fuck is up with Grimace. What the fuck _is_ he? He was like a big purple gumdrop or something."

"Supposedly, he was affiliated with milkshakes," Ian said. 

Brendan snorted. "If so, you think they'd make him, like, brown or something. But I guess then he'd look like a turd."

"They could have made him white, like for vanilla, but then he'd look like a ghost. Or pink for strawberry," Aaron said, momentarily off the koala incident. Michael was going to have to get Ryan a drink in thanks for that. It wouldn't be a problem; he seemed to have accumulated three more new ones while he wasn't looking. Or he was drunk enough to be seeing double; he couldn't rule that out.

"Pink would be gay," Ryan said.

"Like purple isn't even gayer?" Brendan hitched his stool up closer to the bar. "Maybe Grimace was the thing they used in order to make milkshakes. Like, instead of blood, he has milkshake inside him. It's all a big Jesus metaphor."

"No, he was supposed to steal them, or something. But then they needed to make him kid-friendlier." Ian looked deadly earnest, and he had both hands wrapped around his glass. "So then he ended up with like, all this backstory. He's actually descended from royalty. There's a king of Grimaces."

"Is it a constitutional monarchy?" Aaron asked. "If he's royalty, that probably means inbreeding. That explains why Grimace was such a fucking idiot."

"Wait, that doesn't make any sense," Michael said. "If he's king of Grimaces, is Grimace, like, the name or the species? And how the fuck do they fuck? He doesn't have any, you know, parts."

Ian shrugged. "I don't know. Spores? Asexual reproduction?"

"Whatever, I still think he's like Jesus," Brendan said. "Miracle birth."

"Well, fine, as long as we're going to go back to sanctioned cannibalism, explain how you can have Birdie and the McNugget Gang at the same time."

"It's like the Pluto and Goofy thing from Disney. Birdie wears clothes. The McNuggets don't. If you wear clothes, it doesn’t count. You're not food. That's why Mayor McCheese is more than just a cheeseburger." Brendan looked immensely satisfied with himself for producing that progression of logic.

"It's still a form of cannibalism if Birdie eats a McNugget!"

"But she's not the same _kind_ of bird. It's more like a human eating, say, a really smart monkey. Like, a trained helper monkey."

"Dude, I don't know if my brain can handle this shit," Ryan confessed to him. Michael patted his arm and gave him the Goldschlager to cheer him up.

"Michael!"

Michael turned around a little too quickly, and whoa, Amanda was like, right there in his face.

"I need your help with something very important," Amanda said and smiled predatorily, and then she had him by the arm and was pulling him off his stool before he could even figure out where she'd come from. 

" _Help_ ," he hissed to Ryan, and grabbed for him to try and keep himself anchored.

"I feel bad for you, son," Ryan said vaguely, and put his head down on the bar in apparent sudden slumber.

"It'll just take a few minutes," Amanda said. She pushed one of Michael's drinks into his flailing hand, kept a firm grip on his other arm, and started walking. "Just be a sweetheart and come with me, okay?"

"But the McNuggets _talked_ ," Michael heard Aaron say as she pulled him away. "Talking is like wearing clothes."

"Well, that just really proves Ronald McDonald was a sadistic and unfit leader, doesn't it?" Brendan said, and then Michael lost track of them when Amanda towed him through a crowd of dancing people and off to some unknown terrifying fate. He stumbled and a little of his drink sloshed over the rim and onto his hand. Maybe Lenny would see what was going on and save him.

Amanda suddenly stopped and said, "Okay, this'll work." Without giving him much time to further process that, she took his drink, planted the heel of her hand on his sternum, and gave him a firm shove. His ass hit something hard and unyielding, and then Amanda was coming even closer, and then Natalie and Kaitlin were also crowding on either side of him, and he couldn't decide if it was like the worst parts of a nightmare or the best parts of a wet dream. Somehow with a minimum of participation on his part, Michael found himself flat on his back on top of a pool table, staring at the ceiling while Amanda was pulling his shirt off over his head. 

"Are you, uh, going to rape me or something?" he asked, because it was important to know these things and whether or not he was supposed to be yelling, either for help or to make every other guy in the party jealous forever.

"You should be so lucky," Kaitlin said. "You guys didn't think you were the only ones with some kind of contest going on, right? There's more to collect than just underwear."

"Uh," Michael said intelligently. "What?"

"We just need your help to win a little bet. But if you don't want to, you don't have to," Natalie said. "Just tell us if you get uncomfortable, okay?" 

"Okay?" Michael said, wondering if massive and uncontrollable arousal counted as uncomfortable.

"Great," Kaitlin said. "Hey, who has the camera?"

"It's coming," Amanda said. "Where are the others?"

" _What_?" Michael asked, unsure whether to react to _camera_ or _others_ , and started to sit up.

"Shh." Natalie stuck a lime wedge in his mouth, and tapped him on the nose. "We'll be very gentle. Lie back and think of Athens."

"Dibs on his tat," Kaitlin said cheerfully, as several other members of the US women's team began to congregate around him. "Who wants his nipples?"

"Oh my God," Michael said, in simultaneous terror and anticipation.

He sort of lost track of things for a while after that.

His mouth was burning, with crumbs of salt caught in the corners of his lips and the overwhelming sour tang of lime on the back of his tongue. Someone had been wearing cherry-flavored gloss or chapstick; there was just a ghost of a taste he could catch. His head swam from the tequila and from the constant light-strobe flashes of someone taking pictures, which he should really be more worried about because Peter was going to seriously kick his ass if a whole bunch of pictures of women doing body shots off him showed up online tomorrow morning. He might cancel the Swim with the Stars tour, and that would suck, because Michael had been looking forward to going to Disney. Disney was fun, even if they were probably going to make him take a whole bunch of pictures with people in oversized costumes, Mickey and Minnie, Donald and Daisy, Goofy and Pluto. Pluto and Goofy were both dogs, except Goofy wore pants, and that didn't make a lot of sense. Like McDonaldland. He wanted to tell Aaron and the others this, but he didn't know where they were, and there was a lime in his mouth, and Jenny Thompson and Jenny Thompson's rack were leaning over him.

Jenny took the lime wedge from his mouth with delicate, surgeon-like precision, lips barely touching his. She spat the lime out, kissed him lightly on the forehead, and ruffled his hair. "How're you feeling, kiddo?"

"Brendan is wrong about Mayor McCheese," Michael told her. "Also, I think Gary Hall Jr. spat in my drink."

She laughed, but shook her head at the same time. "Okay, guys, no more, he's done," she said, and hopped off the pool table. "Let's have a big round of applause for Michael and let him get back to the party." 

The world tilted a little when Jenny helped him off the pool table, but it steadied after a few seconds. He got six hugs, three kisses (two on the cheek and one on the mouth, though he thought that was more because Diana Munz's aim was skewed by the alcohol), and someone pinched his ass. 

"You're going to delete those pictures, right?" he asked Jenny.

Jenny messed up his hair again. "I won't let them fall into the wrong hands," she said reassuringly, which wasn't exactly an answer.

"Oh _no_!" someone said from behind him, and then the world tilted even more off its axis when he turned around and Inge threw her arms around his neck. Michael's entire body seized up, and he ended up leaning back against the pool table again, because his legs weren't up to the task of supporting him.

"You terrible boy," Inge said, "you've already gone and let them use you before I got a chance." 

"Use?" Michael asked, more than a little off kilter. "Uh, sorry?"

"You didn’t think we were seriously going to let you have Michael, did you?" Amanda asked. "We're not idiots here. That'd be like letting the golden goose just walk right out of the yard."

"No, I was going to steal him," Inge said playfully. "For our team. You should have been drinking with us."

"Sorry," Michael repeated, without really knowing for what he was apologizing. He kind of wished he had his shirt on. "Uh. Really, I am."

"I think you broke him," Jenny said, and then there was a lot of laughter and all the women talking at once, a wave of words about underwear and body shots and empowerment and side competitions and male ego complexes. He would have picked up more except for the fact that Inge was still pressing into one side of him and Amanda was on the other side, which probably proved whatever point they were trying to make to him.

"Anyway, you guys seemed so proud of the underwear thing, we didn't want to ruin your fun and let you know we were kind of doing our own contest thing with the body shots before," Natalie concluded. "Though to be fair, the underwear's been fun also."

"Right," Michael said, a little dazed. "Fun."

"Anyway, since I've been so disappointed by you, I am going to make you do something for me anyway," Inge said. "No refusals."

"Okay?" Michael said. He had to keep himself from automatically raising his hands to cover his nipples.

Ingle leaned in close, up on her toes to whisper into his ear, one arm looped around his neck. "Perhaps you would still like to visit our team? Drink to the Netherlands?"

"Uh," he swallowed hard. "Yeah. That sounds—nice. Really nice."

He could feel her smile against his ear. "Excellent," Inge said, and then she left go all of a sudden, pushed something in his hand, and stepped back. "Pieter is over in the corner by all the palm trees." 

"Okay." Michael looked down at what he was holding. It was a digital camera. "Wait, what?"

"You know Pieter, of course?" Inge said briskly. "I borrowed this from him when I thought I could come steal you. Can you give it back to him now so I can go have some very nice times with these ladies? He has a dark shirt on, blue, I think. He's over in the corner with the palm trees."

"Speaking of shirts," Jenny said pointedly, and handed Michael his shirt. There was a big wet patch of what he hoped was only tequila on the front. He took it from her gingerly, automatically putting the camera in his pocket. "There you go."

"Don't forget this," Amanda added, and handed him the drink she'd brought with him from the bar.

" _Veel geluk_ ," Inge said, kissing him on the cheek.

And then she was linking arms with Amanda and Jenny, and Michael was left alone and shirtless, up one camera and a drink, but definitely down on hot women and the chance to score the underwear coup of the entire Games.

"God _dammit_ ," he said, after a few stunned seconds.

He put his shirt back on, only accidentally sticking his arm through the neckhole twice. He fumbled the camera back out of his pocket to examine. It was nice, too nice to just hand off to someone else and hope it actually made its way back to Pieter. 

Camera in one hand and drink in the other, he worked his way through the crowd, detouring around and plowing through large portions of the German women's water polo team and the Japanese men's gymnastics team respectively. He passed Ryan and Aaron and Brendan on the way; they seemed to have moved on from McDonalds and were discussing the reproductive habits of Smurfs. Ian wasn't there any more.

Through another clump of people, crowd definitely thinning as he moved away from the dance floor and main party area, around the potted palms—someone had thrown up in one and done a really poor job of hiding it—and finally stopped just a few steps away. There were only a few people over in the corner, and at least two eye-searingly bright orange and blue jackets slung over chair backs. 

Dark blue shirt, dark blue shirt—there. He squinted in the dim light to make sure of the hair color and height, and even if those hadn't been correct, the orange lion on the back of the shirt was kind of a dead give away. He put his drink down on the table and shuffled forward.

"Hey," Michael said, reaching in and tapping Pieter on the shoulder from where he was leaning over the bar. "Uh, hey."

Pieter turned around. It wasn't Pieter.

***

_Saturday, August 28th, 1:52 PM_

His phone had been full of text messages ever since his first race; as soon as he cleared it out, another twenty or so would flash in. Michael read the ones from his mother and sisters first, breezed through a couple names he recognized from back home, read one from Peter about an interview getting moved to a different time, and deleted everything from Aaron without even bothering to open them. 

Ian Thorpe had texted him, for the first time in a long time. Michael stared at the notification. He didn't delete it, but he didn't open it either. As long as he didn't read it, he still had the excuse. 

Ryan came stumbling into the lounge, half of his hair flattened to one side of his head and the rest sticking up in a wild bird's nest. He swayed noticeably, and then collapsed next to Michael on the couch.

"Hey," he grunted.

"Hey," Michael said. "Good night?"

"Awesome night," Ryan said. "Hey. Van den Hoogenband left a message for you."

"Which one?"

Ryan gave him a confused look. "There's more than one?"

"Pieter van den Hoogenband, you know, from the Netherlands and the two hundred free, and he has a brother named Robert, and Robert plays water polo, but not here at the Games, and I maybe kind of accidentally slept with one or maybe both of them after I got trashed at the Sports Illustrated party, but I don't remember which one, and I stole some underwear from one of them and ran off, but again, don't know who, and I can't get points for it, and now one of them's calling and I'm gonna get, like, beaten up or married or something." 

There was a long pause.

"What the fuck, dude, seriously," Ryan said.

"I know, right?" Michael said gloomily.

His life totally sucked.

"Do the Dutch have gay marriage?" Ryan frowned. "I guess any country that's okay with weed and hookers probably doesn't care about two guys getting hitched. Shit, maybe you _should_ get gay married. It could be awesome. You should totally invite me."

"I'm not getting gay married in the Netherlands," Michael said. "I just need to, like. Apologize. Or something."

According to his contract with Speedo, Michael was pretty sure he had to actually give them something like three months of notice before proposing if he did plan on getting married at any point over the next four years. God only knew what they'd say if there was a dick in the other half of the equation. 

Ryan was undeterred. "You could marry him, then divorce him and take half his stuff."

"Jesus Christ." Michael clutched at his temples. "I'm not having a gay divorce either."

"You sure? I bet he has a lot of really nice stuff. Like, _good_ stuff." Ryan's expression went sort of distracted, and Michael had the feeling he was envisioning some sort of dramatic courtroom scene, with bongs and piles of high grade marijuana and possibly sex workers being divided up between Michael and Pieter. Or he was just zoning out. It was hard to tell with Ryan.

"I'm not marrying _anyone_ ," Michael muttered, and crossed his arms over his chest. 

Ryan frowned. "If it's about the gay thing, I don't care. I'd even be your best man."

"I kind of have a lot of expectations for a best man," Michael warned him. "No offense."

The Speedo contract also had a clause about 'known social associates' which roughly translated into "you're best friends with whoever we say you're best friends with." Michael was pretty sure it also meant they got to pick out who his best man would be, so if he got marched down the aisle any time within the next couple months, Ian Crocker was probably going to be the one making the toast and organizing the bachelor party. Which wasn't exactly bad, but Ian was responsible and nice and kind of predictable. 

Sometimes, Michael really wished Aaron wasn't with Nike. 

Maybe he could convince Speedo to switch his manufactured rivalry focus to Grant Hackett, because if he couldn't have Aaron putting on a bachelor party, Grant was an acceptable replacement. He'd be an awesome fake best friend, and he probably knew how to hire strippers. But then he'd have to start swimming the fifteen hundred, and that was just not happening, no matter how good of a party Grant could throw. Maybe the four hundred free, but that meant more Ian Thorpe, and that was already an issue itself.

"Whatever. Does this mean you're going to keep doing the two hundred free?"

"Yeah, I'm still in it," Michael said. He thought about adding _so don't get any ideas, dude_ , but Bob had apparently fast-tracked Ryan to his major competition list even before the trials for the Games. No call to be needlessly antagonistic when he might end up having Ryan as his fake best friend at some point.

"Cool." 

Ryan was quiet long enough so that Michael thought he might have fallen asleep again. He poked Ryan in the side. "What did he say?"

Ryan stirred. "What did who say?"

"Van den Hoogenband," Michael said, carefully enunciating each syllable. "What was the message he left?"

"I dunno, man," Ryan said, and shrugged. "He didn't leave it with me. Whichever one it was called Lenny, and Lenny told Aaron, and Aaron told me. I just figured you should know."

Which meant it was probably all over the entire dormitory now. "Fantastic," Michael said. "Fuck."

"I saw a porno with that title, once," Ryan said. "It was superhero-themed."

"Nice." He rested his head against the back of the couch. "When was it? When Aaron told you the message," he immediately clarified, because otherwise Ryan was going to probably give him a full-length recap of superhero-themed pornography. 

"Morning-ish?" Ryan said. "I dunno. What time is it now?"

"It's past two."

"Shit, I could have totally slept another hour."

"If you see Aaron," Michael started to say, and then changed his mind. "No, if you see Lenny, tell him to call me or something."

He started to get up but Ryan grabbed his arm before he could. "Hey. Wait." 

Michael looked down. "What?"

"If you do get married, can I still be in your gay Dutch wedding?"

After thinking for a few seconds, Michael shrugged. "Yeah, okay."

"Really?"

"Sure. Why the hell not." 

After all, Speedo was picking up Ryan, and judging from how he'd done so far, he was going to be hot on the scene in Beijing unless he got hit by a truck, or something. Everyone would be happy. Except for Michael, probably, but that went without saying. 

He levered himself off the couch, but turned back when he was halfway across the room. "I gotta say, you took this better than pretty much everyone else, except maybe Aaron."

Ryan shrugged. "I think I'm still kinda drunk. It's cushioning the whole thing."

"Right, awesome," Michael said, and shuffled out the door.

Outside, the sunlight made him squint. His phone beeped at him. Cupping one hand around the screen, he saw Lenny's name beneath the blinking envelope icon. He clicked it.

_RVDH LOOKING FOR U. BE @ FOUNTAIN 3PM. RESOLVE OR I QUIT SWTS_

Lenny threatening to pull out of Swim with the Stars was an empty threat, and Michael was fully prepared to text him back to say so, when another message beeped in.

_ALSO WILL TELL BOB & YR MOM_

Well, shit.

Michael hovered his thumb over the reply button, then pulled off and shoved his phone back in his pocket. RVDH meant Robert, which meant… something he wasn't even sure of. He'd thought that he'd feel better. He finally had some kind of reasonable indicator of what had happened, and he could probably even keep swimming the two hundred free. 

He felt _something_. But it wasn't relief, exactly. Michael barely knew anything about Pieter, even given his tendency to focus (not stalk, no matter what the fuck Ian said otherwise) on his competition. _Robert_ was a completely unknown factor, something Michael figured not even Bob had noted down in all his game plans. Currently, his pool of knowledge regarding Robert consisted of the facts, that:

He played water polo. 

He smiled a lot. 

He was a year older than Michael, according to his really gay looking pink driver's license. 

He looked enough like Pieter that Michael had serious doubts about being able to tell the difference between them in a swimming lineup with full caps and jammers and goggles. 

He probably wore white boxer briefs, not that Michael wasn't holding out a faint hope they were Pieter's because part of him still wanted to win the stupid contest that had gotten him into this mess. 

He had enough stamina to have possibly gone through multiple condoms, even with Michael (and possibly, God help him, Pieter as well) contributing to the count.

Thinking about the sex now was like trying to remember all of a race; it was almost impossible to get the whole thing as anything linear or close to making sense, just a lot of really vivid bits. Exactly like a race, come to think of it: flashes of body parts shifting around, a combination of underwater-slow-motion and sped-up frenzy of muscle and skin moving under stress. The awareness of joints flexing, a lot of heavy breathing, making a whiplash check to the side and seeing another pair of clenched eyes and an array of ridiculous expressions prominently featuring open mouths and lips peeled back over teeth. And then, everything came to a close in explosive spurts of foaming white and adrenaline.

…And Michael really had to not think about sex and racing together again, even with the similarities, because Bob usually filled him in on everything he missed or didn't remember while he was racing, and thinking about Bob and sex at the same time would make his head explode. Christ.

So. Off to the fountain, then.

He wondered if Lenny had picked the meeting place. If so, Michael was going to give him shit for it later since they were in Greece, where they had fountains situated, like, every five feet. The main plaza of the Village had a massive fountain, which was probably what Lenny meant, though he didn't know how Robert was going to be able to actually get into the Village in the first place. Maybe he'd borrowed Pieter's credentials.

It wasn't too long of a walk. He was going to get there early. He wished it was longer; he didn't want to be the one waiting, like he was desperate. He didn't want to be the one showing up second, either, doing some kind of reverse walk of shame to Robert and whatever the hell he had to say. He didn't want to think about what he was going to have to say himself. He didn't want to be walking and waiting anywhere while it was so hot.

Michael stopped at one of the kiosks set up inside the village and bought a Sprite. It was nice to have momentary control over something he wanted, even something so small.

He drank all of it while walking—it tasted weirdly tart here, different than from at home—and had thrown the bottle away by the time the fountain came into view. Light beat down and reflected off the white stones, blinding. He could feel the heat against his face as he trudged closer. There were people straggling out and about, though not as many as he'd expected. He guessed everyone else had more sense than to be running around while it was hotter than balls out. 

There was only one person standing right beside the fountain, though.

Robert had his back turned and was leaning far out over the fountain's basin like he was searching for something he'd lost, or maybe just stealing coins out of the water. Déjà vu rolled over Michael; Robert was even wearing the same goddamn blue shirt with the lion as before. His hair looked wet, dark curls dampened temporarily into waves instead. 

As Michael watched, Robert scooped up another handful of water to splash against his head. Drops glinted briefly from his fingers as he shook off the excess and wiped his hands against the leg of his shorts.

He took a deep breath.

"Hey," Michael said, mind incapable of coming up with anything else. He shoved his hands into his pockets and walked towards the fountain and Robert. "Uh, hey."

Robert turned around. It wasn't Robert.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translations:
> 
> Mir da lad — bol'shoy klad: Peace and harmony is great treasure.
> 
> Veel geluk: Good luck

**Author's Note:**

> Translations:
> 
> Leonid, Leonid, sidel by ty doma, tochil svoi veretyona: Leonid, Leonid, you [would better] sit at home and cut your spindles.
> 
> Gol' na vydumku khitra: Poverty is crafty.


End file.
